A Prayer to Metatron

Probably twelve years or so ago, before my first book was published, I sent a query letter to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. I got a very nice if perfunctory reply from an editor telling me that they do not consider authors until they have established their voice. This was a polite way of telling me that I needed to be writing magazine articles and/or publishing with a small press before I could hope to be taken seriously by a major player like HBJ. Still, it was advice that I took to heart and, as this post makes clear, have continued to ponder up to today.

Looking at all my books, I think the ones that capture my voice most fully are, ironically enough, the two Idiot’s Guides. It’s almost as if I needed the structure of a formulaic writing format to give myself permission to just set my voice free. I love puns, gentle sarcasm, and being irreverently reverent, and the Idiot’s Guide format actually encouraged all of the above.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write another Idiot’s Guide (about once a year my agent mentions to the editor there that I’d love to write The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Christian Mysticism, never to any avail), but I am working on two projects currently: an introductory book on Christian Mysticism (if the Idiot’s Guide folks won’t publish it, somebody else will, and without a title that is subtly insulting to both author and reader); and the memoir of my conversion from Paganism to Catholicism. Both of these projects are dearly important to me and so the question of my voice remains as important to me now as it did when I had never been published.

An author’s voice is his or her own; no once can do it for you. Still, one way to find “your” voice is to read other writers who have a strong voice of their own. Here’s a partial list of works by authors whose voice I especially admire:

Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich (the John Skinner Translation);

The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton

Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog by Patricia Monaghan

Grace is Everywhere by James Stephen Behrens

The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs

A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris

I don’t know if Metatron acts as the Voice of God or not (although he is assigned that role in Kevin Smith’s irreverently reverent movie Dogma), but assuming he does have that responsibility, here is my prayer:

Angel of the Voice, help me to find my own. With clarity and authenticity, and gentle humor and honesty, with vulnerability and care, and most of all — with a keenly honed sense of fun.

Related posts from A Contemplative Faith:

You asked… Angel of the Voice, help me to find my own. With clarity and authenticity, and gentle humor and honesty, with vulnerability and care, and most of all — with a keenly honed sense of fun.

I have a message for you… I believe you have found it through “The Word”. Do you remember who “The Word” is? Then it is he you need to thank.

Peace The messenger…

http://abracazen.tripod.com Loretto Gubernatis

From the book The Order of Angelic Reformation

TO THE ANGEL METATRON Angel of the Presence

Oh ruler of the seventh heaven Whose size is the width and breadth of the world The tallest one of all King of angels Prince of the Divine Presence Chancellor of heaven Angel of the Covenant Oh little Yahweh Everything must be your way

Oh leader of the people in the dessert Twin brother to that other tallest Angel Sandalphon Oh rod of Moses breathing life and death Oh Specter of the Savior Brother of the Logos Guide to all lost lands like Eldorado I have your golden steed Within my stable ready to ride When thou doth bid me ride Then ride I will like the wind On angels wings

TO THE ANGEL SANDALPHON

Oh Sandalphon if thou shouldst kneel to greet me, Three hundred years have passed and I am no longer quick To see you I must live a thousand lives And grow in wisdoms sight to see thy light Tallest celestial protector of the most high We should faint in laud And then we think, oh God how high is God That Sandalphon is but his footstool?

How many Angels can fit on the head of a pin? Within we look and out into the four corners of our mind And bend time in space Fall through the crack in a looking glass Shattered into ten thousand scattered shards Do we see ten thousand reflections all at once? Or seven years bad luck How many mirrors have you broken and lived to tell the tale?

It is only silver painted on the back A trick to help you see yourself A seeming solid entity Instead of ten thousand molecules

The myth requires it takes five hundred years To travel up from head to toe The practical mind recoils in fears No way can it be so We could not see him turn or shift Only our sanity shifts out to sea In rafts of what we think we know Time is the mystery not space Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels The cause and reaction moving through space is time In time all things can be revealed All things are not revealed in space

I have the time to travel from toe to head If it would take ten thousand lifetimes to know I have the time to believe Elijah in a fiery chariot taken up Where ever up is And I am taken down upon my knees with all the neurons firing in my brain I do believe in Angels I do believe in Sandalphon. The strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to reach up and loosen now But maybe in ten thousand lifetimes I could get one glimpse One look in the mirror And see his shining face Reflected back at me And life would be worth living For that sacred vanity

luis spranger

thanks for this moment . when i look for something just a glimpse make me live just a bit of you o voice of a woman oh buddha oh metatron oh jesus thamk you.